Interview with Adam Hart-Davis

Dear Adam – many thanks for answering a few questions for Gateway. Here goes:

 

GM: This month sees the publication of your most ambitious book to date – HISTORY (Dorling Kindersley – reviewed in this issue, and Historical Book of the Month); you say you're not in history, yet apart from COSMOS, which we'll touch on later, the programmes most people will remember you for are the WHAT THE ROMANS, Tudors & Stuarts, Victorians etc., Did For Us series. Now here you are, general editor of possibly the most comprehensive book on history in terms of scope ever to be published – how did that come about?

 

AH-D: You are quite right: I am not a historian. DK asked me to be editorial consultant on this new book because they wanted an enthusiastic amateur to look it over, read it, and make comments and suggestions on the text. All those programmes on What the Romans/Tudors etc did for us were as much about science and technology as about history.

 

GM: Your mission is to inform by putting inventions, technology, and scientific discoveries into an historical context – by providing a time of reference you seem to be able to make things much more interesting for all age groups, including children. Have you ever thought about writing books on science specifically for educating primary and secondary students as part of the National Curriculum?

 

AH-D: Yes indeed. My third book, Scientific Eye (Bell & Hyman, 1985) was indeed aimed at students in Key Stage 3; the National Curriculum was just being written then, as I recall, and there was some interaction between the people working on that, the people working on the Scientific Eye tv series, which came on later, and myself. I followed it up with Mathematical Eye.

 

GM: After university, you went into publishing as an editor. Was that decision influenced at all by the fact that your father was a well-known and influential publisher?

 

AH-D: I could not find an academic job in my discipline (organometallic chemistry); so I applied for two jobs that were advertised in the New Scientist on my birthday: one was to study potato nematodes at Rothamsted experimental station; the other was to be a science editor at the Oxford University Press. Rothamsted said No; The OUP said Yes. I knew nothing about publishing, but I reckoned that since my dad had been a publisher for 20 years there must be something interesting in it.

 

GM: In a BBC interview a young lad asked you which you enjoy most: broadcasting, writing or photography. Did the interviewer assume they were your favourite activities? Are there other things you are passionate about besides those three? For instance, what kinds of books do you read? What kind of music do you like and listen to? And what do you most like taking photographs of?

 

AH-D: That’s a broad question. I love being out in the fresh air – this morning I cycled to my local BBC studio for a radio interview, and then took my bike around the downs for a spin. I saw a jay and a heron. I like ping-pong and cooking – last night I cooked a tricauliflower special borrowed from Heston Blumenthal, followed by salmon stuffed with spinach and lemon grass. The last book I looked into is an anthology of science writing (specifically, I looked up what Galileo wrote after looking at the Moon through his telescope in 1610). The book I am in the middle of is a crime story. I don’t listen to much music, but I do enjoy light-hearted things – Flanders and Swann, American musicals. I like photographing small things with science in mind – a drop of water, a frosty leaf – plus landscapes, and people.

 

GM: Why the perennial fascination with toilets? Is it just an example of "low technology"?

 

AH-D: Yes, partly, and partly because the subject is taboo – we are allowed to talk about sex, money, food, anything – but not toilets. Yet people are fascinated by them, as I discovered when I did my first tv piece about Thomas Crapper. I had so much interest that my partner persuaded me to write a book, which became Thunder, Flush, and Thomas Crapper – and now there is a sequel – Taking the Piss.

 

GM: The mysteries of the cosmos are utterly incomprehensible to most of us, even though we remain fascinated by it. In your recent BBC2 series COSMOS and in the book that accompanies it, (Book reviewed in this issue) you manage to find a way of making the mechanics of astronomy, which should really only interest those responsible for making the instruments and the structures, fascinating to everyone. Were you responsible for choosing the technological aspects to focus on in the series?

 

AH-D: No, sadly I can’t claim credit for that. The series was all signed up in a great hurry, and almost the first thing I got was a bunch of air tickets. The series was planned mainly by Paul Bader and his team at Screenhouse Productions, with some assistance from the Open University and the BBC. I just did as I was told.

 

GM: Do you think there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, or do you believe that the human race is unique?

 

AH-D: Wow; you don’t believe in easy questions, do you? Having made that cosmology series, and talked to the people at SETI, and various other at the cutting edge, I now think that (a) there is almost certainly some life elsewhere in the Universe - perhaps bacteria below the surface of Mars, or in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, but (b) intelligent life may be exceedingly rare. On planet Earth there are millions of species, but only one has developed technology, especially radio telescopes. (You don’t see many cats with ipods, or whales driving ships…). Are we a one-off mistake? Frank Drake, grandfather of SETI, reckons there may be 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy capable of communicating with us. His chief astronomer, Seth Shostack, bet me a pint they would receive an alien signal before 2030. My view – watch this space.

 

GM: In another recent interview you say you are convinced that the plethora of creams and lotions claiming to turn back the clock for women simply do not work. Is that based on your scientific knowledge as a chemist, or just a gut feeling?

 

AH-D: It’s based on what I know about the human skin and have learned from the scientists at Procter and Gamble, who kindly gave me a whole day of their time to talk about shampoo, toothpaste, cosmetics, and so on. Basically, skin is waterproof - you don’t swell up like a balloon when you go swimming - so nothing goes in through the skin, with the exception of a few poisonous chemicals not used in cosmetics. Therefore the best any moisturizer can do is rehydrate the surface layer, which is continuously drying out in the air. Marketing people come up every year with new ‘miracle’ wrinkle creams, containing placental material, shark oil, aloe vera, and so on, but if any of these worked there would be no need for a new miracle next year.

 

GM: Going on from that, what do you think it could be about the Masai's lifestyle that helps them to remain, in your words: "clean-smelling and beautiful"?

 

AH-D: No idea – I am no expert on the Maasai - but they seem supremely fit, and I bet they don’t use any of those fancy wrinkle creams.

 

GM: You describe how, in 1953, you went to a "rich friend's house" to watch Queen Elizabeth II's coronation; yet you went to Eton, and you're related to the Queen (along with David Cameron). Life in 1953 was indeed, as you describe, austere as we started to recover from the war years – but did you consider yourself as being poor?

 

AH-D: I did not think I was poor, but no one had much money in the post-war years. We never did have a telly in the house where I was brought up; I bought my first one at the age of 26.

 

GM: In the last fifty years we have made some staggering advances, but a great deal of these advances could be described as "tiny little electronic things". Do you think that growing up in the 1950s, we were better off than the children of today, with a vast array of choices available to them?

 

AH-D: Yes I do. Children today are swamped by stuff – tv, mobile phones, and so on. As a result they are probably less likely to use their imagination. We had to make up most of our games, and also make many of our toys.

 

GM: Final question – you must have been brought up in a house full of books. Can you remember any that had a huge impact on you when you were growing up, and maybe influenced how you turned out? Do you have five favourite books you simply couldn't be without?

 

AH-D: Yes, the house was full of books – thousands of them. I particularly remember Lancelot Hogben’s Man must Measure, of which I have a copy now. I also enjoyed children’s stories, including those by Enid Blyton and especially Arthur Ransome. Five favourite books? No; somewhere between 500 and 5000.

 

GM: Adam, thanks for your time – it's been an enormous pleasure – we all look forward to your next project, be it a TV series or a new book, and I wish you every success with HISTORY and COSMOS!